For more than thirty years the mere mention of the Phoenix Program, the CIA's top secret effort to destroy the Viet Cong by neutralizing its 'civilian' leaders, has conjured up dark images of secret assassinations, kidnappings, and the torture of civilians by the South Vietnamese and their U.S. advisers. This study explodes many of the prevailing myths and perceptions of the program and the myriad efforts that until now have been mistakenly lumped together under the term Phoenix. Drawing on recently declassified documents and interviews with more than one hundred U.S., South Vietnamese, and North Vietnamese sources, Mark Moyar dissects the various attempts to eradicate the Viet Cong infrastructure and analyses the effectiveness of each.With balance and full documentation, he addresses serious misconceptions about these efforts and provides the most accurate and complete picture available of the allies' decapitation of the Viet Cong shadow government. Combining social and political history with a study of military operations, Moyar offers a new interpretation of the rise of the Viet Cong and the crucial role the shadow government played in its ascent. Discussed here for the first time are the effects of Phoenix on South Vietnamese villagers.Detailed accounts of sensitive intelligence operations - provided by the CIA officers who conceived and conducted them and the South Vietnamese mercenaries who carried them out - offer the reader an insider's view of how these operations were developed and what really happened in the villages and safe havens of the Viet Cong. Filled with new revelations and corrections of existing accounts, Moyar's study sets the record straight about one of the last remaining secrets of the Vietnam War and offers poignant lessons for dealing with future Third World insurgencies.